New York Times: "What Are the Roadblocks to a ‘Vaccine Passport’?"

"With all American adults now eligible for COVID-19 vaccines and businesses and international borders reopening, a fierce debate has kicked off across the United States over whether a digital health certificate (often and somewhat misleadingly called a “vaccine passport”) should be required to prove immunization status.

Currently, Americans are issued a white paper card as evidence of their COVID-19 shots, but these can easily be forged, and online scammers are already selling false and stolen vaccine cards.

While the federal government has said it will not introduce digital vaccine passports by federal mandate, a growing number of businesses — from cruise lines to sports venues — say they will require proof of vaccinations for entry or services. Hundreds of digital health pass initiatives are scrambling to launch apps that provide a verified electronic record of immunizations and negative coronavirus test results to streamline the process."

Continue reading the article online (subscription maybe required)

https://www.nytimes.com/article/vaccine-passport.html

The Heliix Health Passport is only one of many developers are working on as a way of sharing coronavirus vaccine and testing information quickly and securely. Credit...Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Dr Fauci and Kara Swisher on the Sway podcast (audio)

"Anthony Fauci doesn’t have a Twitter account. But he does have a lot to say about the recent scrutiny following the release of his emails from 2020 — an especially busy time in his tenure as America’s chief immunologist. Republicans like Ron DeSantis have used the emails as fodder for criticism, accusing him of “faucism” (yes, that’s a play on fascism). Fauci’s response: “Here’s a guy whose entire life has been devoted to saving lives. And now you’re telling me he’s like Hitler? Come on, folks. Get real.”

Continue reading the article online (subscription maybe required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-anthony-fauci.html

Dr Fauci and Kara Swisher on the Sway podcast (audio)

New York Times: "workplaces in apartment buildings"

"Before the pandemic, Tony Dopazo leased an office in Boston and used co-working spaces in Brooklyn for his company, Metro Tech Services, an IT provider for start-ups and biotech companies. Then the pandemic lockdown forced him, like countless others, to work remotely. That meant he was on the phone with clients from his apartment building, Level, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

At first, with the common areas in his rental building closed by Covid restrictions, Mr. Dopazo, 47, hunkered down in his one-bedroom, which was “brutal,” he said, “everything mish-mashing into one big blob of time.” But after the common spaces opened in September, he started going down to a co-working area in a ninth-floor lounge every day.

The arrangement affords some “mental separation” from his home, he said, and, with other tenants working in the same space, he has companionship. When he needs to print or scan something, he heads to the ground-level business center. If he’s hungry, he returns to his apartment to make a sandwich, and for a break, he can take a dip in the building’s pool."

Continue reading the article online (subscription maybe required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/realestate/coworking-rentals-condos.html

A co-working area on the ninth floor is where Mr. Dopazo often sets up shop for the day.Credit...Tom Sibley for The New York Times

"The annual fertility rate may be dropping — births have fallen for six straight years"

"Luz Portillo, the oldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, has many plans. She is studying to be a skin care expert. She has also applied to nursing school. She works full time, too — as a nurse’s aide and doing eyelash extensions, a business she would like to grow.

But one thing she has no plans for anytime soon is a baby.

Ms. Portillo’s mother had her when she was 16. Her father has worked as a landscaper for as long as she can remember. She wants a career and more control over her life.

“I can’t get pregnant, I can’t get pregnant,” she said she tells herself. “I have to have a career and a job. If I don’t, it’s like everything my parents did goes in vain.”

Continue reading the article online (subscription maybe required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/declining-birthrate-motherhood.html

"The annual fertility rate may be dropping — births have fallen for six straight years"

MA news: PawSox now WooSox; “It’s a weird feeling”

"The PawSox Moved, but Pawtucket Has Yet to Move On "

 

"The man entrusted with the key approached a dull-gray door flecked with rust. A turn of the wrist threw the lock to reveal a ballpark in suspension, its outfield far from true-hop ready, its billboards fading, its thousands of empty seats the hard-plastic playground of pigeons.

Maybe Pawtucket should charge the birds admission, said the employee, Chris Crawley, who is the maintenance manager for the Rhode Island city of 71,000. His joke was of the coping kind.

It was a sunny and mild Tuesday, perfect for the home opener of the spanking new Worcester Red Sox in a spanking new ballpark 40 miles to the north, in Massachusetts. That is all well and good and hooray for baseball, but — for a half-century and up until very recently — the Worcester Red Sox were known as the Pawtucket Red Sox."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/sports/baseball/pawtucket-worcester-red-sox.html

a night at McCoy in 2019

MA News: main vaccination sites to phase out, here immunity not likely according to some

"WITH 70 PERCENT of Massachusetts adults having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, Gov. Charlie Baker on Monday announced plans to wind down operations at mass vaccination sites while making the shots more easily available in local communities. The shift comes as demand for the shots has been leveling out, indicating that most people eager to get a shot have already done so.

“Now that we believe we are going to hit the 4.1 million goal we started with over the next few weeks, it’s time to adapt our vaccination efforts to make sure we get to some of the harder to reach populations,” Baker said at a State House press conference.  

According to the CDC, 3.9 million people in Massachusetts have received at least one shot as of Monday, or 70 percent of eligible adults. Another 180,000 people have scheduled appointments to get a first dose in the next week. When the COVID-19 vaccines first rolled out in December, Baker set a goal of vaccinating 4.1 million state residents, and he said those people are on track to be fully vaccinated by the beginning of June.

As a result, the governor announced that four of the state’s seven mass vaccination sites will close by the end of June. These include Gillette Stadium, Hynes Convention Center, DoubleTree hotel in Danvers, and the Natick Mall. Baker said those sites were chosen because of the availability of alternative vaccination sites in the area and projections about interest in appointments there. The Hynes site is also part of a federal partnership with FEMA, which was always scheduled to end after eight weeks. The seven mass sites have administered 1.2 million vaccine doses so far."

Continue reading the article online

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/health/state-plans-to-wind-down-mass-vaccination-sites/

 

Boston Globe coverage:  https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/03/metro/baker-says-state-plans-close-four-seven-mass-vaccination-sites-june-outperforming-rest-country/

 

Press conference video link = https://youtu.be/KgFn9aFCGJA

 

 

 

 

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe

"Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/health/covid-herd-immunity-vaccine.html

Boston Globe coverage on herd immunity

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/04/nation/lack-covid-herd-immunity-could-lock-red-state-blue-state-divide-long-time/

"You distinguish between science that’s objectively established as true and science on the frontier"

"Neil deGrasse Tyson is perhaps the country’s best-known popularizer of science. The astrophysicist, who is 62, has achieved that status through his ever-expanding body of work in television, podcasting, journalism, social media and books (his latest is the new “Cosmic Queries”) and as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 

He has done so at a time when, distressingly, skepticism toward established science has become increasingly widespread. Tyson himself received some scrutiny in 2019 after he was subject to two claims of sexual misconduct, which he subsequently described as misunderstandings. Those claims were investigated by his employers at the museum as well as Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic, which respectively air his series “Cosmos” and “StarTalk”; all three of them decided to continue employing Tyson. 

“We’ve lost confidence in our civic entities,” Tyson says about declining public trust in science. “That’s a strong destabilizing force, and some of that spilled over into the scientific community.”

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/19/magazine/neil-degrasse-tyson-interview.html

Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2006. He has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium since 1996. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

NY Times: " ‘Excess Deaths’ in 2020 Surpassed Those of 1918 Flu Pandemic"

"The U.S. death rate in 2020 was the highest above normal ever recorded in the country — even surpassing the calamity of the 1918 flu pandemic.

A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.

Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise. Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic. "

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/23/us/covid-19-death-toll.html

"A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic" (NY Times image)

"they need to get their own minds out of crisis mode"

"They’re calling it a “lost year.”

On and offline, parents are trading stories — poignant and painful — about all of the ways that they fear their middle schoolers are losing ground.

“It’s really hard to put my finger on what happened exactly,” said Jorge Gallegos, whose son, Eyan, is in the seventh grade in Washington, D.C.

When Eyan was in fifth grade, he had a lot of friends, Mr. Gallegos said. He was home schooled for sixth grade, and he seemed to thrive.

But spending this year at home because of the pandemic has just been too much."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/health/pandemic-middle-school-mental-health.html

New York Times: "Making Music Visible: Singing in Sign"

"On a recent afternoon in a brightly lit studio in Brooklyn, Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant and Brandon Kazen-Maddox were filming a music video. They were recording a cover version of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” but the voices that filled the room were those of Gladys Knight and the Pips, who made the song a hit in the 1970s. And yet the two men in the studio were also singing — with their hands.

Primeaux-O’Bryant is a deaf actor and dancer; Kazen-Maddox is a hearing dancer and choreographer who is, thanks to seven deaf family members, a native speaker of American Sign Language. Their version of “Midnight Train to Georgia” is part of a 10-song series of American Sign Language covers of seminal works by Black female artists that Kazen-Maddox is producing for Broadstream, an arts streaming platform."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/arts/music/asl-music-deaf-culture.html

Both men spoke of the impact ballet training had on their signing.Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times

Remote work and the " new normal"

"The post-vaccine workplace is taking shape, and for many it’s going to be a hybrid model, allowing more remote work but with clear expectations that some days a week will be in the office.

Workforce experts are bracing for a whole new set of post-pandemic upheavals, in some instances more transformative than the unplanned move to working from home last March, with some making efforts to avoid pre-pandemic remote-work mistakes.

“In a lot of ways it’s going to be more disruptive than when we went all remote,” said Brian Kropp, vice president of research at Gartner."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required) 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/30/hybrid-office-remote-work-citigroup-ford-target/

 

"Since the pandemic sent workers home last year, a slew of modifications have been made to office buildings to protect against the spread of the coronavirus. Now, as companies prepare to bring workers back, experts say even more changes are on the way.

Expect expanded gathering spaces and fewer personal workstations, for instance, changes that are being fueled by the success of working from home. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Walmart have already announced proposals for hybrid work models that will allow employees to continue to work remotely at least a few days a week."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required) 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/business/office-return-space.html 

 

National News: CDC review of documents; AI and the bias issue

"Federal health officials have identified several controversial pandemic recommendations released during the Donald Trump administration that they say were “not primarily authored” by staff and don’t reflect the best scientific evidence, based on a review ordered by its new director.

The review identified three documents that had already been removed from the agency’s website: One, released in July, delivered a strong argument for school reopenings and downplayed health risks. A second set of guidelines about the country’s reopening was released in April by the White House and was far less detailed than what had been drafted by the CDC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A third guidance issued in August discouraged the testing of people without covid-19 symptoms even when they had contact with infected individuals. That was replaced in September after experts inside and outside the agency raised alarms."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/15/cdc-removes-some-trump-era-guidance/

"Hundreds of people gathered for the first lecture at what had become the world’s most important conference on artificial intelligence — row after row of faces. Some were East Asian, a few were Indian, and a few were women. But the vast majority were white men. More than 5,500 people attended the meeting, five years ago in Barcelona, Spain.

Timnit Gebru, then a graduate student at Stanford University, remembers counting only six Black people other than herself, all of whom she knew, all of whom were men.

The homogeneous crowd crystallized for her a glaring issue. The big thinkers of tech say A.I. is the future. It will underpin everything from search engines and email to the software that drives our cars, directs the policing of our streets and helps create our vaccines."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/technology/artificial-intelligence-google-bias.html

Toward a More Perfect Union: Suit filed on insurrection

In a recent episode of "Toward a More Perfect Union", it was asked who could file a law suit? At least one of the impeachment managers just did per this New York Times article:

"A House Democrat who unsuccessfully prosecuted Donald J. Trump at his impeachment trial last month sued him in federal court on Friday for acts of terrorism and incitement to riot, attempting to use the justice system to punish the former president for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

The suit brought by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, accuses Mr. Trump and key allies of inciting the deadly attack and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s election victory. And like the case laid out in the Senate, which acquitted him, it meticulously traces a monthslong campaign by Mr. Trump to undermine confidence in the 2020 election and then overturn its results.

“The horrific events of January 6 were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ unlawful actions,” asserts the civil suit, filed for Mr. Swalwell in Federal District Court in Washington. “As such, the defendants are responsible for the injury and destruction that followed.”

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/us/trump-sued-capitol-riot.html

 

Franklin's wfpr.fm has a series on Monday called "Towards A More Prefect Union" Frank Falvey converses with Rep. Jeff Roy, Dr. Michael Walker-Jones and Dr. Natalia Linos. The show airs on Monday's at 11:00 AM, 2:00 PM and 8:00 PM. Work is also underway to make a podcast version of this show available.

 

Toward a More Perfect Union:  Suit filed on insurrection

"pandemic baby bust" and "broadband access... an equity issue"

"Signs are pointing to a sizable pandemic baby bust" 

"The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown the country into an economic recession and an unprecedented restructuring of our work and social lives. Early on, some likened the public health crisis to a blizzard, imagining that people would stay home, cozy up with their romantic partners and make babies.

These playful visions have given way to a more sobering reality: The pandemic’s serious disruption of people’s lives is likely to cause “missing births” — potentially a lot of them. Add these missing births to the country’s decade-long downward trend in annual births and we can expect consequential changes to our economy and society in the years to come. Unfortunately, there are no easy fixes."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/opinion/coronavirus-baby-bust.html

"broadband access... an equity issue"

"Newly confirmed US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Thursday the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted significant gaps in broadband Internet access across the country, and vowed to take a “bold” approach to expand that service.

In her first television interview as commerce secretary, the former Rhode Island governor said on MSNBC that her first order of business is getting Americans back to work after a year where unemployment skyrocketed because of restrictions implemented to curb the virus.

“We need to go fast and we need to go big,” Raimondo said, referring to broadband access. She called it an equity issue."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/04/metro/raimondo-we-need-go-fast-we-need-go-big-expand-broadband-us/

New York Times: "a poster child for the idea of climatic 'tipping points'”

"In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers

The warming atmosphere is causing an arm of the powerful Gulf Stream to weaken, some scientists fear."

Follow the link to review this article online at the New York Times. This is one article that is much better viewed with the visuals they use due to the interactive nature of their presentation.

"IT’S ONE OF THE MIGHTIEST RIVERS you will never see, carrying some 30 times more water than all the world’s freshwater rivers combined. In the North Atlantic, one arm of the Gulf Stream breaks toward Iceland, transporting vast amounts of warmth far northward, by one estimate supplying Scandinavia with heat equivalent to 78,000 times its current energy use. Without this current — a heat pump on a planetary scale — scientists believe that great swathes of the world might look quite different."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/02/climate/atlantic-ocean-climate-change.html

“We’re not going to want to dredge and fill forever”

"Officials in Miami-Dade County, where climate models predict two feet or more of sea-level rise by 2060, have released an upbeat strategy for living with more water, one that focused on elevating homes and roads, more dense construction farther inland and creating more open space for flooding in low-lying areas.

That blueprint, made public on Friday, portrayed rising seas as mostly manageable, especially for a low-lying area with a century of experience managing water.

Climate experts, though, warned that the county’s plan downplayed the magnitude of the threat, saying it failed to warn residents and developers about the risk of continuing to build near the coast in a county whose economy depends heavily on waterfront real estate."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/climate/miami-sea-level-rise.html

Does Boston have a plan for rising tides? Does the Cape have a plan?

New York Times: "Where Have All the Houses Gone?"

"This picture is a product of the pandemic, but also of the years leading up to it. And if half of what is happening in the for-sale market now seems straightforward — historically low interest rates and a pandemic desire for more space are driving demand — the other half is more complicated.

“The supply side is really tricky,” said Benjamin Keys, an economist at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who wants to sell a house in the middle of a pandemic? That’s what I keep coming back to. Is this a time you want to open your house up to people walking through it? No, of course not.”

A majority of homeowners in America are baby boomers — a group at heightened risk from the coronavirus. If many of them have been reluctant to move out and downsize over the past year, that makes it hard for other families behind them to move in and upgrade."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/upshot/where-have-all-the-houses-gone.html

As a "baby boomer", we (my wife and I) are looking to downsize and the problem we find is that there is not an acceptable smaller option for us readily available in Franklin, or even in MA. While some of what I would like is available in the South (North, South Carolinas, etc...)  I don't want to go there. 

The article touches on this in mentioning baby boomers but doesn't get into the nature of the supply problem: What kind of inventory do we have? (Whether it is available or not is a separate piece for now). Do we have inventory that would meet the needs of the marketplace and the population now and near term?

Instead of building apartments why not serve the growing sector of the market (i.e. the aging boomers). The Town used the demographics to expand the Senior Center. How come the developers are not using those demographics?

New York Times:  "Where Have All the Houses Gone?"

"without an image of the virus, the scientists could learn only so much"

"Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times."

"With no money to pay for college in post-World War II Scotland, 16-year-old June Almeida took an entry-level job in the histology department of a Glasgow hospital, where she learned to examine tissue under a microscope for signs of disease. It was a fortuitous move, for her and for science.

In 1966, nearly two decades later, she used a powerful electron microscope to capture an image of a mysterious pathogen — the first coronavirus known to cause human disease."

Continue reading the article about June Almeida (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/obituaries/june-almeida-overlooked-coronavirus.html

June Almeida in 1963 at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. In her day she gained a reputation for “extending the range of the electron microscope to new limits.”Credit...Norman James/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

New York Times: "Why Was SolarWinds So Vulnerable to a Hack?"

Security expert Bruce Schneier write about the SolarWinds hack in the New York Times:

"There are two problems to solve. The first is information asymmetry: Buyers can’t adequately judge the security of software products or company practices. The second is a perverse incentive structure: The market encourages companies to make decisions in their private interest, even if that imperils the broader interests of society. Together these two problems result in companies that save money by taking on greater risk and then pass off that risk to the rest of us, as individuals and as a nation.

The only way to force companies to provide safety and security features for customers and users is with government intervention. Companies need to pay the true costs of their insecurities, through a combination of laws, regulations and legal liability. Governments routinely legislate safety — pollution standards, automobile seatbelts, lead-free gasoline, food service regulations. We need to do the same with cybersecurity: The federal government should set minimum security standards for software and software development."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required) 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/solarwinds-hack.html

 

Previous articles on the SolarWinds hack 

(Jan 2020) =  https://www.franklinmatters.org/2021/01/great-summary-of-solar-winds-attack-not.html

(Dec 2019) = https://www.franklinmatters.org/2020/12/what-we-know-and-still-dont-about-worst.html

National News Highlights

• Supreme Court Denies Trump’s Bid to Conceal Taxes, Financial Records - The New York Times

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required) 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-taxes-financial-records.html

• Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era via  The Lancet 

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext

• Fauci: US political divide over masks led to half a million COVID-19 deaths

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/539999-fauci-us-political-divide-over-masks-led-to-half-a

• Biden honors covid-19 victims amid staggering toll, signs of hope

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required) 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-covid-deaths/2021/02/22/911952b0-7527-11eb-8115-9ad5e9c02117_story.html  

President Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff observe a moment of silence at the White House Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)